


Tall Ship Tales

by P0wdermonkey (Hominid)



Category: Pirates of the Caribbean (Movies)
Genre: Backstory, Childhood, Coming of Age, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-03
Updated: 2018-09-04
Packaged: 2019-07-06 09:47:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 7
Words: 17,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15883566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hominid/pseuds/P0wdermonkey
Summary: Jack's backstory from day zero to Shipwreck.





	1. Shine

**Author's Note:**

  * For [viva_gloria (GloriaMundi)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GloriaMundi/gifts).



> Many thanks again to viva_gloria for betareading this long ago for Livejournal. Any problems you find must have snuck in when I transferred it over here, because gloria's beta-reading is IMMACULATE.

** Shine **

The coin twists and turns between her breasts, its bright glint calling to him through centuries of age.  He’s not seen it before, and yet… 

“Where did you get _that_?”

“Pirate!” she teases, bearing down so hard he gasps and throws his head back.  “Don’ you care for nothin’ but shine?”

He gulps air and lifts his head for a better look at the trinket.  A small coin with scalloped edges – pretty, but not worth much – and a string of mismatched beads, one spotted like dice, but curved like a tiny cannonball, or a drop of blood.  You could never be sure how high you’d rolled…

“Seems not.”  She bumps her hips some more, leans forward till her brown nipples ruffle his chest hair.  “We’ll see ’bout that…”

But Teague is a thousand miles and a dozen years away, drifting in an open boat, playing dice with a tattooed mulatta as though his life depends upon it (which, in fact, it does.)  

The strange thing is that he’s alone in the boat—has been for about a week now—but the woman is there too with shells in her hair, and those blood-red dice that keep on rolling long after they hit the planking.  Sometimes he could swear they sink right through the hull and float back up again, still tumbling. 

In the end, he wins, but only because she lets him: he doesn’t need her inky laughter to tell him he owes his life to a whim.  Helped along perhaps by a generous serving of Teague charm.

And being still alive, he makes the most of what he has, digging his fingers into the whore’s buttocks—dark and round as the mulatta’s—to pull her deeper onto him, both of them slick with sweat, writhing and clawing stripes into each other’s skin as fingers spasm.

She kicks her legs like a swimmer and gasps, “Jojo!”  She rolls her head from side to side. The trinket swings wildly.

Charges explode behind his eyes and down his spine.  As his hips leave the straw mattress, he hears himself yell “Tia!” It’s not her name; but his isn’t Jojo.

She stops, still panting, then fetches him a smack on the jaw that’ll ache for days.  “Stupid, selfish, rutting rum-sack!  You promised you’d warn me!”  She clambers moistly off him, and disappears behind a screen.  (It’s a little late for modesty, thinks Teague, but bites his tongue and helps himself to more rum.) 

There are sounds of pouring and splashing.  A lot of soapy water seems to be running down her legs and onto the floor.  Her cursing quietens after a while, then turns to sobbing.  But by the time she comes out, she’s glaring fiercely again.

“Robert Teague, if you got me in a fix, I swear you’ll pay for it,” she snarls.  “An’ for the time I can’t work.  ’Less you wanna go home without the tackle to make more troubles.”

Teague has no desire to go home.  Hoeing turnips in cold drizzle and herding recalcitrant geese has never appealed, not even when he was dying in that boat: Philomena was wrong about that.  But nor does he fancy staying here to risk finding the wench is in pod.

“Julie, love,” he says, “it’ll take more’n a single shot to spoil _your_ shape.”  He tries to emphasise the delightfulness of her current shape with his hands (hampered by the cup of rum in his right), but she bats him away.

“I mean what I say, Bob.  Got three brats still alive, an’ none of ’em grown enough to earn more’n chicken-feed.”

Reflecting sourly that the other fathers most likely made their escapes unsuspected and unidentified, he forces a rueful smile.  “You _know_ I ain’t got but what’s in me coat, love.”

This was the wrong thing to say, for she empties his pockets of purse, rum flask, dice, compass, nocturnal, and spyglass; then she takes the coat.

“You want to check inside the hem and behind the buttons,” he advises, making a gift of what she’ll plunder anyway.  “Got a few good coins salted away in there.”

Her brown fingers would suit fine embroidery, but there’s a brutal strength in the way they squeeze along the seams, searching and weighing.  It takes a good half bell, but she’s somewhat appeased by the end of it.

“Enough for lost business,” she concedes, “but you still owe me for the child.”

“An’ if there’s _no_ child, you’ll turn a handsome profit: I say we’re square.”

“I’ll pay it all back— _if_ you stay ’round till my courses come.”

He silently curses whoever thought to give women brains and let this one take more than her share.  “You’d make a fine quartermaster, Julie.”

“ _Jehu-a-lee_ ,” she corrects—or something like that—which means she’s not going to give an inch.  “An’ you pay up now, ’fore you sneak off like a thief.  Which I know you are.”

He spreads his arms wide, shrugs theatrically.  “Ain’t got no coin left, love.”

“Then steal some!”

He shakes his head.  Out of confusion, amusement, rum and desperation, a plan crystallises.  “Give us back the dice, an’ a safe way out of here,” he says, “an’ I won’t have to.”

He wins enough the first night to pay her off, but stays for another to buy back his spyglass, compass and nocturnal. (It’s not as though he really needs to know the time at night, but he’s grown fond of its elegant brass curves marked out with latitudes and constellations.)  There’s enough over to pay for more rum and another night with Julie.  Perhaps he’s grown too fond of those too, but after two nights of implausible luck, it’s time to move on.

She wakes him early in the morning and takes him down to the kitchen for ale, corn-bread, and a goodbye kiss.  The trinket dangles between her bare breasts.

“Where _did_ you get that?”

She laughs.  “He was a sailor too, that one. Not just any sailor neither, or so he said, but a great lord of the sea—ain’t they all?  Not two ha’pence to rub together, mind.  So he gave me this for keepin’ him warm.  Said he’d not be needin’ it, for he dint care where he went ’long as it were inland.  Went up the river an’ never came back.”

“Piece of eight!” 

Last time he saw this, it was pinned proudly to a Spanish satin coat, surrounded by jewels and lace.  No wonder he failed to recognise it on a greasy leather thong round the neck of a cross-breed whore.  Trust that feckless rat, Roche, to fuck away a sacred token.

“Don’ be daft, Bob!  ’Tain’t but tin, an’ little enough of that, but ’tis a pretty thing, an’ I was glad to get it.”

Would she also be glad to learn it makes her technically a Pirate Lord and member of the Brethren Court?  (Lord of where, for fucksakes?  The swamp?  The flophouse?  The only time she sees saltwater is when some hurricano sweeps in and brings it to her door.)

“Give you a shillin’ for it?” 

If he offers more, she’ll know it’s special.

“Special, is it?” 

Bugger.

“Don’ need a shillin’ jus’ now, thank you kindly.  The fine gentleman who put me in the family way left coin enough to keep me respectable.”

He doubts there’s enough coin in the world for that.  But perhaps…

“You’re right, Julie,” he says carefully.  “It’s special alright, but only to a sailor.  So you take good care of it now.”  He’s fairly sure all three of her brats are girls, though he could be wrong.  It’s enough to make him hope he _has_ got another on her, for surely, any child of his would be a male.  “An’ if you have a babe, an’ it’s a lad, maybe he’ll go to sea, eh?”

She looks at him as though he’s mad, which from her point of view, he probably is. 

“Why’d he want to do a thing like that?”

Why indeed?  “Because…” he says, tearing a blank page out of the ledger and rummaging for quill and ink, “because if he does, an’ if he can learn enough sea-craft to read this, then he’ll know where to sail.”  He scrawls a rough map of Shipwreck Cove, leaves it unnamed, but scribbles latitude and longitude.  “An’ if you give him that, um,  trinket, an’ tell him to show it to the Keeper—the Keeper of the Code, that is, but Keeper’ll do—then he’ll truly be a lord of the seas.  An’ a rich man to boot,” he adds, seeing that she remains unimpressed.  “Able to keep his mother in luxury to the end of her days.”

She sniffs.  “Think I can manage that by me onesies.”

But she folds the map carefully into her skirts, and keeps one hand on the piece of eight as she waves him goodbye.

*

It’s not that he forgets the misplaced piece of eight.  He is the Keeper, after all, and it matters to him that things should be properly kept. 

He even wonders once or twice if there’s a dark-skinned child running wild in the swamp, dreaming of the sea.  Maybe the boy’s heard that his da was a mad sailor named Teague; for sure, he’ll know a few men eager to get a closer look at da’s dice, preferably at knife point. 

But what with the world being so big (and pirates so argumentative), it’s a few years before the wind carries him back that way. 

When it does, Julie, her brats, and the trinket are all long gone.


	2. Names

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jack's backstory, days 266 and 275 (give or take a couple of weeks)

The baby came with the storm.  From the sound of trees thrashing outside, she could tell it was a bad one: the sort that comes once or twice in a lifetime.  But she didn’t have much attention to give it.  She wasn’t planning on going outside any time soon.

By the time the trees started snapping, she didn’t know there _was_ an outside. 

Afterwards, looking at the broken stumps, she remembered a sound like gunfire, almost lost in the screams of the wind.  (Well maybe the wind wasn’t the only thing screaming.)  But at the time, she was standing under a waterfall that had nothing to do with the storm, or anything else outside her own body: it took everything she had just to keep breathing and not get washed away.

She did dimly register the moment when the roof lifted off, mostly for the sudden arrival of a hell of a lot of sea water and a live, wriggling crab that landed right on the bed.  (Dorcas trapped the crab in a warming pan until the baby came.  Later, it went in the cook-pot.)

The next thing she remembers clearly is the sound of newborn crying and the sight of her own whitened knuckles clamped to the headboard. 

With a conscious effort, she takes back control of those distant hands and gently manoeuvres her body around to flop back against the pillows.  Everything is streaming wet from blood, sweat, rain, seawater, or some combination of these, but the storm outside has passed as suddenly as the one inside.

Maisie gathers up the afterbirth and inspects it with suspicion.  “All in one piece,” she declares at last.  “You done good, girl.”  She holds the afterbirth over the baby as Dorcas cradles him.  When the blood stops pulsing down the cord, they tie it and cut it through.  The baby’s on his own.

Dorcas hands him to her, wrapped in a cloth.  She wants to study his squashed and crumpled face, but he knows what he’s doing, this one, for he stops his bawling and snuffles into her breast.  She crooks a little finger into his gummy mouth and helps him latch on, not that he needs much help.

“Got a thirsty one there,” comments Maisie with a grin. The baby sucks greedily. 

Tsehu’alee smiles back; such eager feeding is surely a good sign.  All she can see of his head is stuck-down black hair and one storm-grey eye.  (He’ll have black eyes like her, then, not light like Bob’s.)  With one arm cradling him and the other hand supporting his head, it’s hard to unwrap him for a better look.

Dorcas pats her arm.  “I checked already, Julie love,” she says, flicking back the cloth to let her see him.  “He’s ain’t very big, but he’s _just fine_.”  She looks into Tsehu’alee’s eyes as she says this, for they both know why it matters.

Tsehu’alee’s other child, the one before this, was stillborn, and the one before _him_ wasn’t fine at all: her face was covered in sores.  Amadi had to be coaxed to feed—not like this one—and she grew slowly when she grew at all.  Now her teeth have grown in odd shapes and she can’t see properly for the clouds in her eyes.  She’s not the only child with such problems—“languid” they call them—and the whores have a good notion of the cause.

But there’s no mark of pox on this one.  P’raps he was born lucky.  P’raps the storm washed off the curse.  Or p’raps it’ll be back to claim him…  But she won’t think of that, not while he’s healthy and strong and perfect.

He fusses at her nipple.  The proper milk hasn’t come in yet and he’s not finding much to drink.

Tsehu’alee eases him off, wraps the cloth round him again, and kisses the soft spot where the top of his head rises and falls to the beat of his heart.  He’s still stained with birth-blood.  He smells of salt and metal, and new life.

Tears prickle behind her eyes, but then the baby tries to turn his face up on his floppy stalk of a neck.  He pushes a tiny clenched fist into her jaw and does his best to clamp his gums around her chin.

“That’s not where the milk is, silly.” 

Tsehu’alee puts him on the other breast, watches him suck for a minute then doze off, apparently worn out by the effort.

Just before she falls asleep herself, she feels Maisie pull away the soaked bedclothes and tuck a dry blanket round her.  She can see blue sky through the ceiling, which is odd somehow, but nice.

“You sure you don’ wanna move downstairs?” asks Maisie.

Tsehu’alee shakes her head.  “This is just fine,” she whispers sleepily.  “Everything’s just fine.”

~

Nine days later, the roof has been retrieved from the vegetable patch and more or less reassembled.  The water’s gone, the crab’s been eaten, and life is getting back to normal.  But it’s clear this was no normal storm.  It’s brought down trees that have seen off hurricanoes, trees that stood strong through the big one when Hettie was a child. 

The shape of the world has changed: the river’s further away now, and the swamp wider.  This could be bad for business, but the boatmen who sail the river—the ones who still have boats—say the ocean is closer and the channel deeper than before, so perhaps there’ll be sailors passing through.

Tsehu’alee prays they’ll have full bollocks and fuller pockets; the place is a mess.  Although only the whorehouse was treated to a delivery of wrack, starfish, and startled crustaceans, there’s reeking mud everywhere, salt has killed most of the crop, and several families are homeless; worse, four people are dead and three missing.

She will name the baby on her own.  The others don’t understand about the nine days: they think she’s daft not to have named him already but, since she’s left it so long, what’s another day?  They’ll call him something else, anyway. 

It’s not easy.  Smelly Mud, Smashed House, and Tree Stump are not good names; Scuttling Crab makes her shudder.  Little Fish would do at a pinch, but _she’ll_ know the fish in question were nine days dead and rotting, even if he doesn’t.  She kicks ineffectually, but painfully, at a fallen tree.  Maybe, just to see their faces, she’ll name him Your Sister’s Dead But Nobody Gives A Shit.

Poor little Amadi didn’t even merit being numbered with the storm dead.  Drenched and chilled in the rains ahead of the main storm—she was slow reaching cover—she died, spitting blood, two days after it passed: “Better, this way,” René said.  “Child like Amy weren’t gonna live more’n a couple more years anyhow, an’ you’ve another to mind now—a healthy one.”

She pictures herself slicing a kitchen knife through René’s eyeballs, turning the handle to smash his crooked teeth in.  “Oh lookit _that!_ ” she’d exclaim, all innocent dismay.  “Poor René cain’t see nor talk right!  He may as well jus’ die now an’ save us the burden of keepin’ him.  Ain’t that right, René?”

She shakes the daydream out of her head and tries to focus on the still-nameless baby.  René meant it kindly, or so she tells herself, and grieving for Amadi won’t bring her back, nor get her brother named.

Sky, maybe.  It’s a girl’s name, mostly, but no-one knows that here.  Blue sky through the missing roof was the first thing she saw after he was born, and it’s about the only thing that looks whole and friendly at his Naming. 

She tips her head back for a better look just as the men winch up the last of the big roof beams and let it thump into place. 

There’s a sound like whssssssssssssssssssh as four or five score little birds all lift at once from the other end of the roof.  Confused by the loss of their usual roosts, the flock wheels and dives, snapping through the air like a swept banner, finally carried away seawards with the cooking smoke.

Tsehu’alee smiles.  “Fly to somewhere better, Flock of Small Birds!” she whispers, adding, but not aloud—not at a Naming—that anywhere but a pie-baker’s would be a distinct improvement.

It’s a good name, Tsaga’auweh.

The others can call him Jack.

~


	3. A Keel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jack's story.

Later, when he’s grown, Jack will occasionally reveal that his original name was Tsaga’auweh, even, once or twice, that it means Flock of Small Birds in the savage language of his mother’s people.  What he’ll never mention is how he came to hate the name after that terrible journey from the whorehouse where he’d spent his short life. 

For what felt like weeks, they travelled inland (hence, clearly, as far as Jack was concerned, in the Wrong Direction) across marsh, forest, hills, and plains, his mother feverish and coughing, giving out the last of their coins for a cramped seat in a leaky boat or a bumpy wagon.  Jack had no say in where they went (not that this stopped him protesting).  All he could do was scan the stars to keep track of the direction, memorise landmarks, and try to gauge the distance covered; because one day, somehow, he was going back.

His mother’s village, when they eventually stumbled into it, was small, well organised, and hospitable—up to a point.  In return for looking after Tsehu’alee and her soon-to-be-orphaned children, the latter were to live like civilised folk, and express their gratitude for this privilege by never mentioning their old lives or forgetting their lowly status.  This was not Jack’s idea of fun.

Suddenly, what used to be a secret name shared only with his mother and sisters, was the only name no-longer-Jack owned, and its shortcomings got on his nerves.  Why “ _Small_ Birds” for heaven’s sake?  Why “Flock”?  What was wrong with “Bloody Terrifying Massive Great Eagle”?  Better still, “ _Sea_ Eagle”?  Mam was always saying he’d be a sailor, after all, even though he had yet to see the actual ocean.   

He missed the noisy, brandy-scented whorehouse parlour, the kitchen warm with baking and full of scraps waiting to be snaffled by hungry children; he missed sailing logs around the swamp guided by the stars.  Most of all he missed his biggest sister, Nancy.  No more Notlvsi for her: she was old enough to stay behind and earn her living at the whorehouse.  Jack’s other sister, once Sally, but now forever Saloli (meaning Squirrel although Jack mostly calls her Bedbug) was never lively company, still less after she took to life in the village like one born to it. 

Lucky old Saloli, thinks Jack bitterly; but it’s Nancy he envies.  For him, the routine of growing corn (hard and dull), respecting elders (dull and frequently impossible), religious observance (mind-numbingly dull), and warrior training (terrifying until he figures out it’s all a sham, then just silly— _and_ dull) has grown ever harder to bear, even as other difficulties (the language, his foreign looks) have lessened.  Grandmother is the only one who seems to see things his way; she’s friendlier and funnier than he’d expected from a sorceress, and he likes it when she lets him help out with her charms and spells.  But it’s not enough. 

His mother dies during the second winter.  Within days, Jack is paddling a canoe towards the place where, on his first night in the village, he watched the second star in the Chicken-Headed Goat’s tail climb over the horizon.  At last, he’s headed back to the whorehouse where he was born, but mostly just headed away from all that damned chanting and corn.   

The constellation Jack calls the Chicken-Headed Goat (having catalogued the night sky after someone told him this was how sailors found their way at sea) isn’t, in fact, visible because it rises and sets during daylight in winter.  But he knows the sequence of stars that rise in the same segment of sky, so that’s not a problem.  What _is_ a problem is finding navigable water so he doesn’t have to walk all the way through the woods and hills, over the plains and into the swamp.  That and finding anything to eat.    

Jack’s paddle is a flat stick, helped along by his legs kicking the water on either side.  As for the canoe itself, Jack is aware that some people might overlook its finer qualities due to the unfortunate lack of time, tools, and skills needed to hollow out his… _craft._   (He steadfastly refuses to think the word _log_.)  However, a born sailor such as himself can appreciate the vessel’s remarkable canoe potential. 

In fact, with the backward-pointing branch on the hull to serve as a keel, it’s practically an embryonic boat!  As such, it deserves a proper name, so, using a good dollop of river water, one of Granny’s spells and as much as he can remember of Aggy’s rosary (in case the spell proves insufficiently nautical), he christens it the _Wicked Wench_ after the establishment to which he plans to travel.  He has to break off the keel in the shallowest swamps and even crosses a couple of dry places that force him to beach his canoe and find a new one on the other side, but the name travels with him all the way home.

~

The whorehouse looks good.  Someone’s repainted the sign, rejuvenating the carved wench (who, in Jack’s opinion, looks not so much wicked as well fed and scantily dressed, albeit he’s been told the writing above her head says different.)   René and Dorcas are sitting in the shade smoking and peeling potatoes (René doing most of the smoking while Dorcas peels).  They don’t notice Jack and his canoe gliding along the creek, but they look up, startled, when he climbs the bank and starts walking towards them.  

He’s not sure how he imagined this moment, but it never occurred to him that they’d fail to recognise him.  When they do—quite spectacularly—he decides to take it as a compliment.  It’s not just the longer hair and strange clothes: he’s grown up in a year and a half. Truth be told—and it occasionally will be—Jack’s pretty impressed with himself: locating one small whorehouse across many miles of unknown country is no mean feat for a small boy. 

In later years he’ll try to incorporate his first voyage into the history of the great pirate he’ll have become.  It’s a challenge, because the full glory of the achievement tends to be dulled by censorship of certain elements (being dragged against his will to a landlocked village that doesn’t appreciate his finer qualities; starving half to death on a floating log because he’s not very good at spearing fish or aiming effectively at passing squirrels).  Mostly, all that survives is the name of the first vessel Captain Jack Sparrow ever commanded. 

“Jackie?” quavers Dorcas, as if she still can’t believe it.  “Julie’s boy?”  

“Returned to you from an epic an’ arduous voyage!” he replies, doffing an invisible hat, and sweeping a bow, for he still remembers how fancy folk behave in the big world beyond the village and he intends to be part of that.  

“Don’t just stand there, René.  Fetch Nancy!”  

Then he’s enveloped in Dorcas’ fleshy hug and not released—or indeed permitted to breathe more than the bare minimum to sustain consciousness—until Nancy comes down.   She’s grown too.  She wears her hair up like a proper lady and there’s paint on her face (both a bit out of place it’s true, but Jack loyally supposes this is the height of elegance for a person sleeping off a hard night’s work).  And her threadbare shift lifts and falls and, well… _swells,_ around, over, and amongst a generous helping of fantastically female curves.  Jack can hardly believe this _woman_ is his scamp of a big sister.  She’s taller than him, so he has to hug upwards, but he pats her comfortingly as she sobs into the top of his head.  

Everyone’s come out to gawp now.  He gives them his best smile and wave, stepping back from Nancy and suddenly feeling rather dizzy.  Next thing he remembers, he’s sitting at the big wooden table.  Dorcas has just set a huge, steaming bowl of stew in front of him. 

“Eat up, Jackie!” she exhorts (unnecessary, but appreciated).  “You look starved half to death!  I dunno what Julie’s people eat, but you can’t’ve got very much of it, eh?”  

He wants to tell her he’s had enough bloody corn to last the rest of his life and has become rather expert at catching fish, thank you very much—not to mention the one squirrel—but his mouth’s full of bread and stew so he just grunts, shakes his head, and shovels in another spoonful.   A bowl of stew, a certain amount of beer, and a lot of questions later, Jack’s well into his tale.  His mother’s death arouses murmurs of regret, but no surprise: they knew Julie was going home to die.  What they want is the manner of it, which could pose a problem...  

“I’m glad she made it home,” Aggy reflects sagaciously, “for all it was among heathens.  She never wanted to die a whore.”  

“Hush!” says someone.  

“Aye!  Better to live as one, eh?” calls Daisy, which gives rise to a general round of laughter and drinking to that.  In the ensuing confusion, Jack manages to refill both his cup and his fancy. 

“What you may not be aware of,” he begins, raising his voice over the din, but then waiting for it to subside before he continues.  “What you may not be aware of is that my mother, Julie, or more properly Tsehu’alee,” (his imitation of a catarrhal elder nicely exaggerating the name’s ungodly sounds) “counted as minor royalty among her people.”

This is greeted with some cynicism.  

“You may scoff,” Jack concedes graciously, “for these are, after all, but simple savages who have royalty the way more civilised folk have…”  He casts around for a station that is elevated yet plentiful.  “…tavern keepers or ships’ Captains.”  

This seems to go down well.  Big Alf, proprietor of the Wench, grins broadly.  

“Tsehu’alee came from a wealthy and powerful family—by local standards, naturally.  Indeed, ’twas for that very reason she was forced to leave.”   

Nancy is giving him funny looks, but he can talk to her later, in private.  It is, he feels, a stroke of genius to turn the awkward fact of Mam’s exile into proof of her exalted rank. 

He pauses for effect and a gulp of beer.  It tastes heavenly after a year and a half with no alcohol whatever (except for that time he and Mam tried to ferment corn mash, with mixed results).  Soon, he has them rapt with the tale of the Princess Who Could Not Marry.  (In Jack’s version, this is not because nobody wants the odd-looking daughter of the village witch and an outlandish stranger on the run from something he never explained, but because all the tribe’s high-ranking single men have been slain defending their homeland.) 

Boldly, Princess Tsehu’alee set forth to seek a man worthy to renew the blood of the tribe.  (Buzzard in a Tree would have a few words to say about her decision to seek this paragon of manhood in a trading post whorehouse, but Jack’s current audience seem to have no problems with it.)  Many years later, she returned home in triumph—without a husband, true, but with two fine children.  Tragically, however, Queen Tsehu’alee’s quest had robbed her of her health: she passed away with dignity and grace, surrounded by her grief-stricken subjects. 

To the dismay of all, the Queen was succeeded by her wicked uncle Squashed Beetle (which sounds fearsome as long as you don’t translate it), who sent poor Jack to toil in the cornfields for his daily bowl of gruel.  But Squashed Beetle’s daughter fell in love with Jack despite his now lowly status, and vowed to marry none other.  Her father threw her into prison, but the beautiful Tits Like Coconuts escaped.  (Here, Nancy chokes on her grog and has to be slapped on the back before the story can continue.)

Together, the young lovers stole a war canoe and fled towards the coast, but Squashed Beetle and his men caught up with them; Tits Like Coconuts was slain; Jack fell unconscious into the river, and was left for dead.  On waking several miles downstream, only his extraordinary stamina, ingenuity, and knowledge of the heavens enabled him to return, battered but unbowed to the land of his birth.  

“Won’t they come after you?” asks Aggy, wide-eyed.  

“Doubt it,” assures Jack, with unfeigned confidence.  “They think I’m dead, don’t they?  Anyway, how’d they find this place?” 

They never let him forget how he failed to track a deer through sand in broad daylight (damned wind kept blowing the sand around, didn’t it?)  So how’d they guess he’d kept track of the stars on his journey to the village and used them to guide his way home so he hardly set foot on dry land?  (And he’d like to see those smug deer trackers bring down a squirrel with one stone _and_ steer a canoe at the same time—even if it was only the once.)  

“That’s all very well, Jackie lad,” says Alf with a leer.  “But how’re you gonna to earn yer keep in a whorehouse?  We’s clean out of princesses with wicked uncles, in case ye’d not noticed, an’ the sailors as comes through mostly wants what they sees on the sign: an actual wench.”  

“With tits like coconuts,” Nancy adjusts her own pair and eyes Jack’s flat chest with a rueful grin.  

“Not all of ’em, I bet.” 

Jack does his best to look knowing and authoritative (which in a way, he is, warrior training having had its more stimulating moments). 

“An’ anyway I can do jobs, an’ pick pockets an’ stuff.”  He casts around for something more novel and manly.  “I could go into town and trade for things: tell people ’bout the Wench—bring in more trade.”  

~  

To everyone’s surprise—not least Jack’s—this is pretty much how things, in fact, turn out.  When he’s not voyaging around the swamp on his canoe or lying around with the whores, telling stories and braiding beads into each others’ hair, he sees to it that vegetables get peeled, grates emptied, wood chopped, and floors more-or-less, as and when absolutely necessary, mopped.   

Everyone learns that Jack works better when not given orders, and that the louder and cruder a man shouts on his way in, the likelier it is, after few drinks, that he’ll be slipping quietly upstairs with Jack.

As often as he can manage, Jack takes the boat up the creek to fetch flour and brandy.  His youth and inexperience are a magnet for traders with sharp eyes and glass beads. 

“See how they shine?  Every one fit for a king an’ worth a doubloon if it’s worth a penny, but to a fine lad such as yerself, I’ll let ‘em go for three bits, savvy?” 

Jack thanks them politely and explains that he savvies all too well.  Then he makes his way to the warehouses and taverns.  He generally returns to the Wench laden with a welcome—if unpredictable—assortment of cut-price supplies, woozy with complimentary alcohol, and followed by admiring new friends with broad grins and jingling pockets. 

He’s home, and he’s happy.  For a while, he almost forgets that he’s still not a sailor.

~


	4. A Hull

Jack’s business acumen and the Wench’s popularity at the trading post being now well established, Big Alf spends a whole day going through the accounts ledger and finally agrees to let him barter Aggy’s favours to one of the boatmen for a trip downriver. Perhaps he can spread word of the Wench’s excellence to more hands from the ocean-going ships.   
It works. Sailors, even officers (who have more to spend), visit the Wench in ever-increasing numbers. Everyone thrives, most of all Jack, who now gets to see the ocean almost every month. He never forgets his first sight of her: the smell of salt, gulls tumbling through the incomprehensible lacework of masts and ropes… and the horizon! It ought to fill him with dismay, for how can he find his way without a hill or a tree on the skyline to track the stars by? But all he wants is to swoop into that glorious, hazy distance and let it take him where it will.   
On every trip to the port, Jack watches impatiently for the change from brown river water to turquoise ocean. Then he jumps right in. The boatman’s alarm gives way to laughter once he works out that the daft lad from the whorehouse can swim round to the dock by himself. (And Jack squelches less once he works out that it’s safe to leave his shoes and jacket on the boat.)   
The clean taste of salt on his face as the waves bounce him up and down is the best thing Jack’s ever known. When he dives down, several dozen green crabs pop out of the sand and nibble at his searching fingers. He assumes this is normal, so never mentions it when he clambers onto the hot boards of the dock, dripping salt water (and a couple of tiny crustaceans). Much later, this accidental silence will become deliberate.   
Whatever his love for the sea, talking himself onto one of those magical ships and sailing far, far away on her turns out to be harder than he thought. Ships dock here to load and unload, not to take on crew. Nobody wants a scrawny young stray (“I’m old for my size, sir, honest!”) who doesn’t know one end of a boat—ship!—from another. He considers stowing away, but not for long because he has a pretty clear idea what will happen once he’s found.   
So he charms as many sailors as he can and appropriates their nautical knowledge along with more tangible items. (He soon learns that officers know most about navigation and trade, but the hands know about the sea, the weather, and all the unseen pulses and humours belowdecks that decide if a ship functions smoothly or sickens and dies.)   
He gets himself a compass (no need to dwell on the means of acquisition), and uses it to navigate logs around the swamp on lazy afternoons. But he knew his way around the swamp before: the compass just makes it feel smaller. Jack bares his teeth at the sky and rages. It’s not fair: Mam said he was a sailor! He pauses, frowning, for Mam wasn’t mad—not much anyway, and only at the end—and he knows he’s no sailor, not yet.   
What Mam said exactly, he now remembers, was that Da was a sailor and Jack would be too, because Da’d left a special sailor’s thing for him, a thing that would make his fortune once he learned to use it. A thing he’s not thought of since the village… He hurtles off his log and splashes home by the most direct route, not caring that he’ll arrive covered in stinking ooze so long as he gets there fast. At Dorcas’ shriek, he flings his muddy clothes onto the kitchen floor and runs upstairs naked (but still dripping a pungent black trail).   
Da’s talisman is there, with the clothes Jack (Tsaga’auweh then) wore in the village, in the leather pouch that hung around his neck. This was supposed to contain all kinds of mystically significant body bits and souvenirs of rituals, none of which Jack—born and bred in the godless, trackless world—had properly performed or possessed. Seeing how people sighed at Jack’s empty pouch, Granny had asked him for the talisman, collected his fingernail clippings, and popped both into it, along with a twist of frizzy black hair kissed lovingly as she took it from her own neck pouch.   
“Something of yourself, your father, and your mother’s father: that’s big magic, Tsaga, you just tell ’em. It’ll protect you strong as anything the others have,” she assured him solemnly as she hung it around his neck, adding, with one of those Granny sparkles that always vanished before he could be certain she’d winked at him, “Always provided you look out for yourself first, that is.”   
The beads look as pretty as ever, brighter than the trading post “jewels” (although the coin is worthless tin). He casts around for a safe place, somewhere it won’t get lost or attract unwanted attention. In the end, he puts it back in the pouch and hangs it round his neck, inside his shirt. Then he smoothes out the paper it was wrapped in. Mam said this showed the place he had to take the talisman to claim his birthright.   
He’d always thought it must be a picture—maybe of a pattern of pools or blobby bushes that would appear on the horizon when he neared the place. But he knows about charts now, and can see it’s one of those, with a sketchy compass rose in the bottom left corner and what must be a group of islands. There’s writing as well, which he can’t read, and daren’t show to anyone else. And there’s something very familiar about the paper…   
His chart is a page from the kitchen ledger! René and Dorcas use this to keep track of monies spent and paid. Same paper, same symbols—or so Jack can but hope. If he can learn to read one, he can read the other. What with all the sharp trading he does in town and port, it’s not hard to convince René and Big Alf that he could help with the accounts. They decide Dorcas can teach him his letters and, if he shows promise, René will tackle the sums.   
But Dorcas leaves the ledger on the shelf and leads him outside, where she points up to the sign. “What’s it say?” she asks.   
Jack squints and scowls. He doesn’t like feeling foolish. “The Wicked Wench, of course. But I can’t read it. I just know.”   
“I din’t ask you to read it,” she states, “but, since you know what it says, you can at least try. How many words?”   
He thinks about this. “Three?” It feels like three and the letters above the wench’s head are in three groups.   
“Right you are! First one’s “the” so forget that for now, Jackie, an’ look at the other two. Notice anything?”   
He stares hard, quite forgetting to feel foolish. Both words start with the same letter, a kind of zigzag.   
“Aye,” chuckles Dorcas. “Now why might that be?”   
Jack can feel his mind trying to make connections it hasn’t got. How hard can it be if René and Big Alf can do it?   
“I see the letters,” he says. “I know what it says, but…”   
“No buts!”   
He shuts his eyes and mumbles under his breath, twisting his fingers together. Then he looks at the letters again and sees. “Because wicked and wench start with the same sound!”   
Dorcas beams at him. “I allus said you was a smart’un, Jackie. Right from when you was born.”   
She lets him go through the ledger after that, proudly pointing out Ws: wine, walnuts, wax, wool, and—more perplexingly—tallow, pewter, and crowns. By the end of the year, he can read and write as well as anyone at the Wench, and do sums better and faster. Now he can read the letters and numbers on the paper his father left him: Shipwreck Cove, Shipwreck Island, 19° 18′ N, 166° 38′ E. Ask for the Keeper   
~  
Jack can read the map now, but he still doesn’t know what it means, or how he’s supposed to get there. There are days when he lies on his back watching clouds sail across the sky and just wants to scream. He’s put so much effort into enlarging his world, and all he’s done is push the horizon out of sight.   
Then the cartographer visits. Jack doesn’t know he’s a cartographer at first (and would probably have guessed it was something to do with carts anyway), but his curiosity is piqued by the skinny man in a shabby wig who buys brandy and tobacco, then sits reading a book for half the evening before he beckons Nancy over and slips her a coin.   
It’s an actual, leather-bound, printed book! Jack’s itching to get his hands on it, an aim he soon achieves by hiding under Nancy’s bed until he can pull the cartographer’s coat across the floor and go through the pockets. He has to lean up to the very edge of the bed to catch the lamplight on the pages. He’s on chapter two when a bony hand seizes him by the hair and forces his face up.   
“A literate rogue!” exclaims a voice that combines the vowels of an especially stuck-up officer with all the command manner of a boiled carrot. “You would appear to be a strange thief, young man.”   
“You’re a strange sailor!” replies Jack, startled into honesty.   
“Your statement,” replies his captor, shifting his grip to Jack’s wrist to facilitate conversation, “is based upon a false assumption.”   
Jack looks at Nancy, who shrugs.   
“You observed that I came in on the Golden Venture and I am more than a passenger. You assume that persons on a ship must be either passengers or sailors, leading you to the mistaken conclusion that I am a sailor. I am, in fact, a cartographer: one who studies lands known and unknown and attempts to represent them on paper as faithfully as he may.”   
To cut a long story short (something Jack will do with increasing brutality), it transpires that the Golden Venture was dispatched from Plymouth by an English Earl to seek new lands across the ocean. The Earl dreams of cornering the market in some exotic product, an aim the cartographer views with some scorn. His dream is simply to discover and record the greatest possible area of the globe with the greatest possible accuracy.   
Encouraged by Jack and Nancy, the cartographer—whose name is Philip Askew—is soon marvelling at his good fortune in having so swiftly made the acquaintance of the best-travelled person for miles around, namely Jack, who knows every secret backwater of the river, and even the savage lands of the interior where no white man has been.   
~  
Captain Redruth is less delighted with the information, but supposes grumpily that—provided he can get himself back to the ship before morning tide on Wednesday—Askew won’t be any less useful for a day or two footling around in a swamp. This deadline precludes a venture into the interior, but leaves time enough for Jack to guide his learned visitor along the upper meanders of the river. They set off in the Wench’s rowboat (Jack having now definitively graduated from log canoes), loaded down with provisions, note books, sketch books, spyglasses, quills, ink, lead pencils, and a variety of other cartographical paraphernalia as fascinating to Jack as it is unfamiliar.   
At first, Jack rows as instructed, holds instruments, boils water for tea, answers questions about currents and sandbanks, or the names of prominent features (invented for the occasion), and watches the cartographer sketch and scribble. When he’s seen enough to form a notion of how this works, he begins to ask questions of his own.   
Mr. Askew is surprisingly willing to provide answers, enlightening an enraptured Jack at some length on such topics as the methods for ascertaining the height and distance of hills, or alternative notations for indicating strength and direction of currents. Jack learns that a compass works because the Earth behaves like a giant magnet, that the instrument resembling a collapsible, brass bow and arrow is, in fact, a Davis quadrant (less properly, a backstaff) developed by Captain John Davis, and used to measure the altitude of the sun or moon. He’s even allowed to use it, standing with his back to the sun, sighting the horizon through a slit, and holding the quadrant so that one vane casts a shadow on the other. (Why anyone would want to do this is not explained, but Jack immediately senses its usefulness, having watched the sky since he first played at being a sailor in the swamp.)   
By the time they are headed back to the whorehouse, Jack is noticing inaccuracies in Mr. Askew’s new charts and realising, with an all-too-familiar sense of impending trouble, that he won’t be able to keep them to himself. Mustering his reserves of patience and tact (such as they are), he frames a question about why a bend appears to divert ever-so-slightly further northwards on the ground than one might expect from Mr. Askew’s drawing.   
Astonishingly, Mr. Askew not only acknowledges the flaw with good cheer, but compliments Jack on his acuity (whatever that is). He thus becomes the first person in Jack’s life to arouse ridicule, pity, admiration, and wonder in more-or-less equal proportion, and in sufficient measure to render him—briefly—speechless.   
After this, the journey downstream is easy: Jack hardly needs to row, and Mr. Askew has only small adjustments and corrections to make to his maps. As they drift down the last, broad, stretch of river, Jack attempts to sketch out some of the ground between them and the village, applying techniques learned on the way up. Mr. Askew is spellbound—less, as it turns out, by the creeks and woodlands themselves than by Jack’s ability to depict them. He asks questions, sets problems, scratches his head, and—as Jack rows them home along sluggish channels through the swamp—makes an offer that takes the boy’s breath away.   
~  
What Mr. Askew proposes is nothing less than a new life in a new world—the whole, entire, spherical world, as an awestruck Jack mutters to himself whenever his belief in the promise starts to falter (which it does quite a bit, especially after sundown). But a new life requires a new identity: more specifically, new parentage. Fortunately, Jack’s father changed from Irish pirate to English sailor years ago, this being more acceptable for business purposes; so Mr Askew is aware of only one problem.  
“There’s no denying her occupation, I’m afraid,” he pronounces, as Nancy trims Jack’s hair to shoulder length, and scrapes it back in a neat queue. “But I’d advise you to say she was of European stock—Spanish or Portuguese perhaps, to account for the black eyes and, er, dark complexion.”   
“Spanish it is,” agrees Jack, sure Tsehu’alee won’t care whether she’s a dead Spaniard or a dead Savage. “Mi madre, Juliana.”   
Jack himself is perfectly happy to be European if such provenance confers privileges on a European ship. What rankles is the implication that he couldn’t pass for pure English if he tried. He immediately resolves to work on his speech and mannerisms until he can confound Mr. Askew by passing himself off as a county priest or a village squire. (His notions of Englishness are somewhat hazy.)   
Still, he’s left with the uneasy awareness that all his cleverness might have been foiled by darker skin or curlier hair. Suddenly, he feels perversely proud of the village (forgetting how he was teased for his odd looks and couldn't wait to leave). When his white status is assured, he’ll delight in flaunting a range of affectations "picked up from the Savages in the interior": long hair, beads, feathers, headbands, paint…  
“And you can’t be simply Jack,” says Mr. Askew. “What was your father’s name.”  
“I don’t remember,” replies Jack, who has never felt need of a surname.  
“You could be Jack Edwards?” suggests the cartographer. “It was my mother’s maiden name.”  
“Why not?” says Jack. Then struck by a sudden, fierce loyalty to the name his mother chose: “No! I remember now: it was Bird. Or Small. Something like that. What’s a small English bird?”  
At noon, freshly scrubbed, dressed in his plainest shirt, britches and weskit (specially laundered by Dorcas herself), Jack signs on the Golden Venture under the glorious title of Cartographer’s Apprentice. The name he enters in the log in perfect, painstaking copperplate is Jack Sparrow.   
~


	5. A Deck

Jack Sparrow, cartographer’s apprentice on the Golden Venture, has a lot to learn. The actual cartography, he absorbs like mother’s milk: it’s just a matter of finding tools for what he’s been doing in his head as long as he can remember. As for navigation, the hardest part is persuading the First Mate to show him the basics and remembering to let the officers get there first.  
Not everything comes so easy. The position of cartographer's apprentice (and indeed of cartographer) turns out not to command quite the admiration Jack had supposed: he quickly understands that he’d better make himself as useful and pleasant as possible if he’s not to be Ship’s Whipping Boy for the duration of the voyage. Luckily, he’s had plenty of practice charming clients and tradesmen at the Wench, and is happy to take on any task for the sheer thrill of getting acquainted with the ship and the sea. He swabs a lot of deck, patches a lot of canvas, and soon earns a reputation for hard work, fast learning, and good-natured cheeriness. (The exception is carpentry. Much as he wants to understand how the ship is put together, wood that he cuts never quite fits; pieces he joins have a habit of coming apart.)  
By the time they put in at Recife (ostensibly to trade English wool for tobacco, but really for a final provisioning stop before entering Spanish territory), Jack knows not only his ropes, but how to ascertain latitude, calculate the ship's speed by means of the log, navigate by dead reckoning, and use a nocturnal to tell the time at night. He can spit his baccy to hit a swooping gull on one attempt in three, and even sleep in a hammock without injuring himself when he falls out. (Not falling out will take longer.) He's also learned the English names for his familiar stars and for the ones that appeared when they crossed the Line. (Of course, he marked the occasion with the traditional extra grog, tattoo, and earring, but it’s the new stars that really impress him: at his insistence, the mermaid who now cavorts lewdly athwart his right buttock does so under the twinkling eyes of both the Great Bear and the Southern Cross.)  
Perhaps it's the enormity of seeing the Pole Star vanish from the heavens that makes him take heed when Jeb, the long-suffering carpenter, warns him not to spend all his pay on whores and drink in the sweltering tropics until he’s got himself a spare shirt, a good coat, and some mittens. (Also, the whores aren’t quite the temptation they will be when he’s older.)  
"It's flaming draughty round Cape Horn," sings Jeb with a theatrical shudder as he taps a larch-wood fillet into the gap in the latest of Jack's wobbly dovetails, humming the rest of the shanty as he planes it down. Sixty days and thousands of miles later, most of it southwards, the deck turns slippery as spilled oil and Jack sees icicles for the first time in his life. Aloft the mizzen top, he snaps an especially perfect ice spear from what he now unhesitatingly recognises as a starboard futtock shroud, and turns it in the watery sun until his fingers melt holes in it. A few more days, and he'll be knocking icicles out of his hair by the dozen, never giving them a thought.  
~  
Jack's lessons with Mr. Askew continue through all but the harshest weather. They huddle over the table in the cartographer's tiny hutch of a cabin annotating the Atlantic coast and studying what awaits them in the South Sea. Here, Mr. Askew has marked possible positions of the elusive Southern Continent, and of the gold-rich Isles of Solomon, not seen since they were charted nigh on two centuries ago by a Spaniard called Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa. (Sarmiento de Gamboa was abandoned in New Spain and his charts dumped overboard to secure the claims of a rival navigator: “For which reason we shall endeavour to accord full credit to Captain Redruth and his officers, whether it be merited or no.”)  
Jack, who can now interpret the figures on his father’s map as latitude and longitude is first thrilled to find the blank area suspected of concealing the Isles of Solomon lies in roughly the same direction, then dismayed at the vastness of that blank, surrounded by more trackless, featureless blank. There is more ocean than Jack’s hitherto omnipotent imagination can comprehend. But still he drinks it all in, and dreams of stars, horizons and distant landfalls.  
Sometimes, for a change, Mr. Askew unrolls charts of lands closer to his home: Britain, Holland, Spain, Germany, France; or perhaps Newfoundland, far Cathay, Singapore or India. Jack opens his eyes wide and memorises whatever appears before him. He learns of the race to claim the New World, a race already won by Spain, leaving other nations to bicker over the scraps and pilfer what they can from her glutted treasure fleets. He hears of the mighty Inca Empire, savage and illiterate, but so rich their children’s toys are cast from solid gold, now subjugated to the Spanish Viceroyalty of Peru. The same Viceroyalty where dwell a heathen tribe the Spaniards call los Jivaros, a people so savage not even Pizarro could conquer them. Los Jivaros practice what Askew calls cranial extraction: they take out their enemies’ skulls and display the tanned and shrunken heads as trophies. Furthermore, they slaughtered tens of thousands of colonists and forced molten gold down the throat of a greedy governor until his bowels burst, spewing crimson steam. Jack shudders and gasps, but the horror on his face masks equal parts of admiration and disbelief.  
At other times, Mr. Askew pulls out a book from his trunk and attempts to teach Jack Latin (with pleasing results) or Greek (with almost no discernible results), or he lies back on the bunk and asks Jack to read to him in English or French. Jack is often frustrated, occasionally disheartened, but invariably fascinated by the intellectual profusion lavished on him. It's as though the cartographer has thrown open a locked treasure chest and is heaping gold coins in his lap faster than he can count them.  
So when Mr. Askew rests a trembling hand on Jack's thigh and quavers, “Are you aware that you bear a most striking resemblance to your pretty sister?” Jack’s main response is relief that he can begin to square accounts. He’s always viewed bodily pleasure as an effective—and sometimes enjoyable—form of currency; he’ll never understand why Askew’s infrequent and diffident fumblings are the only times the transaction sickens him.  
~  
The voyage from Plymouth has taken longer than hoped and the weather is worsening fast. Mr. Askew wants to avoid Cape Horn and seek the passage through the Strait of Magellan, north of Terra del Fuego, accidentally taken by the Frenchman, Marcand in the Sainte Barbe. Jack has just enough sense to keep his mouth shut and ears open when the First Mate, Mr. Collier, points out frostily, that the Golden Venture is a three-masted bark. This apparently makes trying to follow the Sainte Barbe (a single-masted tartane) not unlike a bull trying to fuck a chicken.  
Captain Redruth, on the other hand, contends that she’s shallow on the draught and anything that promises shelter from the approaching southern winter has to be worth a try. “When you’ve been at sea as long as I have, Mr. Collier, you’ll find chickens can be more accommodating than you think.”  
Authority and cartography carry the day. They locate the passage and sail through, south of New Spain, but north of Cape Horn. On their port side, Tierra del Fuego lives up to its name: it sparkles with fires lit by the local Savages. “To show they mean to cook and eat us if we come to shore,” says Mr. Collier.  
Jack privately thinks that if he lived in this frozen hell-hole and had as few clothes as the locals, he’d probably light all the fires he could build.  
On the fifth day of May, the Venture comes through the Strait—Jack helping to update charts whenever he can be spared from the cold, dangerous work aloft—to reach the South Sea off the discouragingly—but fittingly—named Port Famine. The total damage suffered is minor under the circumstances: two men lost overboard and a third to a broken leg; a splintered yardarm, considerable damage to rope and canvas, and a number of fingers and toes claimed by frostbite. (None of the latter belong to Jack, for which he thanks Jeb by making sure the old carpenter’s hammock stays warm as often as possible.)  
They spend a week refitting and replenishing their stocks of meat, water, and firewood at an uninhabited island, then head off into the unknown. The cartographer is convinced the elusive Southern Continent lies to their west but is overruled: everyone (even Jack, though he never says so) wants to head north, away from winter’s strengthening grip. This turns out not to be a good decision.  
~  
Crossing the Pacific will, of course, feature in the subsequent legend of Captain Jack Sparrow, but never in detail. Jack will tell himself that a passing mention carries more weight than wild-eyed tales, implying as it does that Jack and horror are on nodding terms. The truth is he’ll never willingly dwell on memories of that voyage. He’ll show his scars from sea monsters and cannibal spears, point out teeth lost to scurvy, or the time he watched waterspouts pass the ship to both sides at once, but he’ll move quickly on to exploits involving Spanish gold or admirals’ daughters. It’s not that he couldn’t sail across the Pacific again—of course he could. It’s just that he’s never met anything he wanted to run away from that badly.  
After weeks on the open ocean, the islands where they’d hoped to make landfall fail to appear. They have enough confidence in their position to spend days quartering the area before concluding that the charts are at fault. Endless weeks later, storm-blown, becalmed, frozen and baked by turns, all they know for certain is their latitude (when they can see enough of the sky), and which ocean they are in.  
They try following flocks of birds and even pods of whales, but neither leads them to land. Their supplies dwindle or rot. Fish and rainwater offer some relief, and there’s hardtack if you can get it moist enough to chew, but Jack is alarmed how often the talk turns to eating of boots, hempen rope, and in particular, tender young cabin boys.  
At last, the lookout spies floating twigs—real ones, not seaweed. Exhaustion gives way to excitement as the trail leads to more debris, smaller, landlubberly birds, and the glorious sight of cloud-covered mountain peaks rising about the waves. They are saved!  
Everyone who can still walk volunteers for the landing party. Jack, despite his entreaties, is left on the ship with Mr. Askew and Captain Redruth. From this vantage, they watch the yawl pull up on a sandy beach and the lucky sods aboard split into three groups to hunt, look for water, and pull greens for the sick. Jack and Askew divert themselves from the rumbling in their stomachs by charting what they can see of the coast. Jack is viewing the hills through his spyglass, trying to come up with something more specific than “trees” to mark on the map, when he hears a commotion behind him and Redruth ordering anyone who can still crew a gun to get below.  
Down on the gundeck, there’s no knowing what’s afoot, although it’s obvious the landing party has come under attack. Jack helps ready a gun and fire it at the closest of the still unspecified trees, possibly because the attackers are lurking there, or perhaps just for the sake of damaging something that’s not too close to the landing party. No more orders being forthcoming, he opens a spare gunport and takes a look.  
The greens-pulling party and a few of the water-seekers are struggling to get the yawl out to sea. Quite a few of them seem to be wounded. The hunting party are trapped at the top of the beach by a large group of distinctly unfriendly savages with spears and bows. (Which explains the sticks and feathers poking out of the wounded.) Things must have been looking pretty good for the savages until the gun blew a hole in the forest. This has clearly made an impression, although not enough to allow the hunting party to make a break for it.  
“Make ready to fire!”  
Jack hastily shuts his gunport and scurries to his post. This time, the shots hit closer to where the hunting party is held at bay. The savages point excitedly at the shattered greenery and the smoke gusting from the side of the Venture. Very sensibly, in Jack’s opinion, most of them decide to bugger off, legging it towards the undamaged end of the beach in a less than dignified fashion.  
The hunters fight their way through a few stauncher (or stupider) savages. The yawl picks up all those who make it to the water. It’s a discouraging tally. Only the fittest and most experienced sailors got a place in the landing party; now four of them are dead and six more wounded, including Mr. Collier, who took an arrow to the shoulder. All they have to show for this are a few bundles of dubious-looking greenery, optimistically termed “wild celery”. (As it turns out, the chewy green stuff does seem to help with the symptoms of scurvy, but there’s not much of it and no-one fancies going back for more.)  
~  
It’s several weeks and too many deaths before they next sight land. It’s another small island, this time ringed by a reef that holds the ship out of firing distance of the shore. Hungrier, but warier than last time, they circle round, looking always for signs of habitation or a safe harbour.  
Jack can still stand watch, although there’s less actual standing than sitting or lying, which is easier on joints swollen with scurvy. He held out well at first—perhaps thanks to sharing Askew’s store of sweet biscuits and marmalade—but now the disease has him in its grip. His limbs ache, his skin’s peeling off, and his gums are like wet flannel: he’s lost two of his front teeth and doesn’t even have the energy to mind. For all that, he’s the first to spy the canoe.  
“Canoe” is what everyone seems to call it. But Jack knows canoes, and this isn’t one: it’s big, with curving, carved bow and stern posts, and not one but two proper hulls, one supporting a hut-like cabin, the other apparently some kind of counterweight or stabiliser. And it has masts and sails. Beautiful sails, woven out of leaves, with big bellies and a strange, claw-like point at the top that gives them the look of seashells, or lilies grown to catch the wind. It carries almost a dozen natives, and there are three more coming round the promontory.  
A sailor waves a white cloth, which they’ve heard is a sign of peace throughout the South Sea. The muscular, well-fed, healthy-looking men in the canoe keep their bows drawn but lower them ever so slightly so the arrowheads point at the water. The wasted and shambling men of the Venture throw empty bottles, strings of beads, and a length of calico towards the canoe. These are picked up with apparent approval.  
Captain Redruth conveys, by sign language and shouting, that they need water, food and a place to come ashore, for which they are willing to trade more cloth and trinkets. A particularly impressive islander flaps his arms and shouts in a way that could be welcoming or could mean, “Depart our sovereign waters instantly, or prepare to die.” But the arrows still point down. Everyone aboard the Venture cheers, hoping a bargain has been struck.  
~  
A few days later, nobody having shot anyone as yet, Jack is sprawled on the sand beside a smouldering fire, picking stewed fish and wild celery strings out of his teeth and—despite the unpleasant new gaps in his mouth—generally feeling good about life.  
“Sparrow! Get yer arse out of the sand! Cap’n wants you.”  
Captain Redruth has had the actually quite sensible idea of sending a delegation to the nearest village to improve the current arrangements for food, water and shelter. The only volunteer is a crewman called Ben Scroope who, for some reason, has picked Jack to accompany him.  
“Why d’you have to go an’ pick me?” Jack demands as soon as they are out of earshot. “What’ve I ever done to you?”  
“Nuffin,” says Ben affably, adding on further reflection, “Nuffin I din’t like. But don’ you see? You should be thankin’ me fer this, ’stead of bellyachin’.”  
“How’s that then?”  
Ben glances nervously over his shoulder—the vegetation hides them completely from view—and whispers, “I ain’t a-goin’ back on that ship. Not never.”  
To his own surprise, Jack understands exactly what Ben means. He keeps his mouth shut for fear of agreeing.  
“I dunno what these blackamoors live on, but I reckon they do alright—tall an’ plump, an’ all, an’ I ain’t never seen ’em do more work than fishin’ or paddlin’ them canoes. An’ the girls, Jackie! Runnin’ round wiv no more’n a scrap o’ stuff t’ cover ’em. An’ more’n willin’ to show what’s under it if you so much as give ’em the ol’ once over.”  
Jack nods, happily, remembering how the crew were greeted by near-naked, gyrating girls who jiggled their bare titties under your chin (well, roughly level with Jack’s, but under everyone else’s) and flipped their skimpy loin cloths out of the way to let you view the goods. They pulled a few startled (but definitely unresisting) men towards the bushes…  
“Remember it well, Ben. Pity the officers had to chase ’em away.” He’s struck by a sudden thought. “D’you reckon we might run into ’em again at the village?”  
“Now yer getting’ it, lad! Still sorry I brought you along?”  
“All depends,” says Jack, “on whether they decide to gobble us up figuratively or literally.” This goes right past Ben Scroope, so—rather than embark on one of Mr. Askew’s educational excursions—Jack changes tack. “Why me though? Thought you’d’ve picked Bob Platt…”  
“Bob’s a good mate, but he’ll wallop anyone ’e thinks is givin’ him lip. What we need’s a way to make these savages unnerstand wot we’re after, someone wot talks their language.”  
“Which I don’t.”  
“C’mon mate! I know yer not Spanish. You got a lick of the tar brush—no mistakin’ that. I don’t hold it agin you, mind—not me—an’ I won’t go blabbin’ to them as would. If anyone can cosy up to the locals, it’s you. Anyhow, you’d charm the pants off Davy Jones hisself, you would.”  
“Oh would I?” says Jack, who’d been about to object vigorously, but finds himself distracted by possibilities. The likes of Bob Platt, Mr. Collier, Captain Redruth, and even Mr. Askew probably expect the villagers will be honoured to trade their entire food stocks for some sea-spoiled cloth. And they’re liable to counter reluctance with gunpowder…  
“Get us ’nough food an’ timber to keep the cap’n quiet, then tell ’em a few of us wants to stay ’ere.”  
“Not so fast, Ben. S’pose a couple of these savages showed up on yer auntie’s doorstep in Plymouth an’ asked to move in, eh? What we gotta do is to bide our time an’ make ’em take a shine to us ’fore we start askin’ for favours.”  
“Aye,” concedes Ben after a pause for unaccustomed thought, during which Jack’s opinion of him rises several notches. “We oughter’ve brung gifts or sumfin’.”  
“We have!” Jack holds out his hands to display an earring, a knife, a flask, assorted coins, some battered playing cards, a thimble, a comb, a whistle...  
“Where’d you… Oh.” Ben pats his now empty pockets, but grins gamely. “Fair ’nuff, I s’pose, as trade fer a whole new life. Go on then, Jackie—do yer worst!”  
Jack doesn’t answer. He’s already at work on his legend.  
~  
Well, you see now, there were hundreds’n’hundreds of these Savages—with spears an’ poisoned arrows an’ such—an’ I could see the Cap’n was goin’ to shoot his musket and get us all killed, so I borrowed some goods from the hold and went to trade with 'em meself, on the quiet like. Was best friends with the chief in no time. Asked me to marry all four of his daughters. But that’s another story…  
~


	6. Sails

“Pig!” says Jack, pointing.

“Piki!” replies the chief, whose name probably isn’t Aricketycoffeecup, but he seems happy to accept that as Jack’s best effort.

“Aye!  Piki!”  Jack grins like an idiot in acknowledgement of the chief’s best effort, and waggles his head around, which seems to mean agreement.

Aricketycoffeecup waggles his head more.  “Puka!” he splutters, tipping backwards with laughter.

“Puka, right.  So pig is puka.  Marvellous!  Now we’re getting somewhere.”  Jack laughs to show willing and scribbles “Pig-puka” on a banana leaf.  He studies the leaf, takes a deep breath, and asks, “Aricketycoffeecup po bang-bang puka?” which with any luck means, “How many pigs do you have?”

Aricketycoffeecup says something Jack doesn’t catch at all, but then he holds up 9 fingers.

“Right,” says Jack.  “Aricketycoffeecup po…”  He consults his leaf.  “… po _wanky_ puka.”

“Yo-ey,” agrees Aricketycoffeecup, waggling proudly.  “Wanky puka.”

“In that case,” says Jack, “Telly Howee sniffle wanky puka.”  He points towards the beach to make it plain that Telly Howee, the Big Foreigner, is Captain Redruth, not Ben Scroope, who’s got to be six foot seven standing up (but just now is sitting on a log with a naked girl in his lap). 

Aricketycoffeecup looks worried, which is encouraging. 

“Telly Howee sniffle koy,” Jack elaborates.  “Telly Howee sniffle goomuttooey.  Telly Howee sniffle popeye.”  Meaning, he hopes, that Captain Redruth will take the food, the trees, and the sweetish, somewhat slimy, probably plant-based mash Jack and Aricketycoffeecup have been eating.  “Telly Howee sniffle!”  Lacking a word for “everything”, he sweeps his arm around in a wide circle.

Aricketycoffeecup calls one of his lieutenants and orders, “ _E tuatua no tetai tangata Tikioki kua keia i te puaka, no ko mai no Titama e ngati Pee.”_

To Jack this is “Eh twatwat no titty something ticky-ocky-quacky something puka, knocko something tit something pee.”  Something about pigs then.

Aricketycoffeecup turns to Jack, takes a deep breath, and enunciates, “Aricketycoffeecup aroopa fanny puka.”

The old bloke’s getting the hang of this!  Jack’s leaf tells him “fanny” means “six”, which leaves only one question.

“Aroopa?” he asks, willing it to mean “hide”.

Aricketycoffeecup sets out some pebbles, covers them with his hand.  “Aroopa!”

“Wonderful!”  Jack beams.  “I mean, oomah!” 

A bit more messing about with pebbles establishes the plan: the Small Foreigners (Jack and Ben) will bring Telly Howee (the big foreigner) to see Aricketycoffeecup at a simple hut with three pigs and a store of food, everything else being safely aroopa-ed away somewhere Jack doesn’t need to know about.  The islanders will trade all they have for the white men’s goods and show the white men where to fish.  Then the white men will go away.

Seeing as Aricketycoffeecup’s such a quick learner, Jack teaches the chief how to tug his forelock, nod for “yes”, and shake for “no”.  (He reckons Redruth’s never going to figure out this waggling business, and a bit of respect never does any harm.)  Then he prises Ben away from his true love and they set off back to the beach.

~

Jack has to admit the _Venture_ puts on a good show.  They all change into the best clothes they have left—Redruth and Collier in brocade, braid, and big hats—and Jake plays on his whistle as they march down to the native village, which now looks sadly under-populated.

Aricketycoffeecup shuffles out of the hut, wide-eyed and markedly shabbier than the last time Jack saw him. 

Redruth salutes smartly. 

Aricketycoffeecup flinches.

Redruth holds out his hands, palm up, and says something about peace, prosperity, and the British crown.  He does a decent job of appearing powerful yet peaceable: Jack relaxes slightly.  Then Redruth gestures for Jack and Ben to present the gifts.  Aricketycoffeecup seems genuinely pleased with 6 yards of calico, a sailor’s knife, and a couple of empty glass bottles. 

“I am Captain Redruth,” says Captain Redruth.  He repeats it slowly and clearly, pointing to his chest.

“Ah!” says Aricketycoffeecup, and points to himself.  “ _Ariki te Kafika_.”

“Ah!” says Redruth, looking to Jack for help.

“Aricketycoffeecup, sir.  Seems to do the trick.”

Redruth clears his throat.  “Greetings, um, A Rickety Coffee Cup.”

Nobody sniggers.

Aricketycoffeecup nods (good man!) and says, “Telly Howee po ofo!”

“He says greetings too, sir,” explains Jack.  “Telly Howee—that’s their name for you.  Means ‘Big…’ er, ‘Big Man’, sir.”

There’s a great deal more.  In the end, Redruth gets all three pigs, piles of assorted foodstuffs, permission to cut down trees, and the promise of fish and fresh greens.  Aricketycoffeecup gets cloth, bottles, and tobacco, but fails to get any more knives.  (Jack’s not sure if that’s a precaution against attack, or just that knives are in short supply.)  Last, but clearly not least, he gets Mr. Collier’s hat, which he will wear on important occasions for as long as Jack knows him.

As they leave, Aricketycoffeecup hugs Captain Redruth. 

“Nana Telly Howee!” he says.  “Nana!  Nana!”  Then putting one arm round Ben Scroope’s waist and the other round Jack’s shoulders, “Nana Tacky!  Nana Penny!”

“Nana means ‘goodbye’?” guesses Redruth, coping better than Jack was expecting.

“Aye.”

“And Tacky and Penny?”

There’s a long pause.

“That would be me an’ Ben, sir.”

This time, pretty much everybody sniggers.

~

After a couple of weeks, the ship is mended and partially restocked; they have directions to another island where they’ve been promised more pigs and some kind of fat, edible bird; and Jack has a problem.

Redruth—disappointed by the island’s lack of gold, gems, spice, or any promising trade goods—is set on pushing further into the unknown.  Askew hopes to head south in search of Davis Land, the Southern Continent, or Lord knows what.  But they’ve little idea where they are; the food they’ve taken on won’t last a month; and the stench of scurvy still hangs over everything below deck.  Jack hates to admit it after the effort he put into getting to sea, but he’s going to desert. 

The plan is for Jack, Ben, and Bob to vanish just as the _Venture_ puts to sea.  With any luck, no-one will spend long looking for them.  The question is how to tell Askew.  He hides a letter between the pages of the declination tables where the cartographer will find it next time he checks the _Venture’s_ position against solar or lunar altitude—which won’t be until that position has changed.  Then he watches from the concealment of a bushy breadfruit tree as the patched sails of the Venture dip below the horizon.

_Dear Mr. Askew,_

_If you’re reading this letter, then you’ve sailed with the Venture, and I haven’t.  I’m sorry to part from you, but I’ve fallen in love.  No, not with a girl (although there are several I like the look of and who seem to like the look of me), but with Redruth Island.  I’m not ready to leave here yet—not even to discover a new continent.  I want to learn all about how the people live and the other islands they sail to.  I want to make maps of it all, and I want to learn to sail their canoes._

_So please don’t worry about me (or Ben and Bob).  We’ve not been taken hostage or eaten.  But don’t tell Captain Redruth._

_You taught me more than anyone else I ever met.  I’m very grateful for it and you needn’t fret that I’ll go native and forget, for I’m going to study this place like a proper scholar.  If you come back this way, I promise you the most perfect and complete chart of Redruth Island and surrounding area: all you’ll need to do is fill in the longitude._

_Yours in gratitude,_

_Jack Sparrow_

_P.S.  I have borrowed the small almanac, the Christopher Cock spyglass, the divider you don’t like, and the Wilmot with engravings, also paper and ink.  I shall take good care and endeavour to return them undamaged (except the last two) when you come for the charts._

_P.P.S.  By my calculations our position is 7 degrees west of your reckoning (10 W of Mr. Collier’s and 4 E of Captain Redruth’s).  We are likely all wrong, but I advise adjusting westwards rather than eastwards if you decide to adjust at all.)_

~

Philip Askew, cartographer, never finds Davis Land, mostly because it doesn’t exist, but Jack’ll swear on his mother’s grave that there’s a tribe on the shore of the Southern Continent where coconuts drop from the trees and fish leap out of the waves practically onto the griddle; where the women are dusky and well-endowed while the men are pale and angular.  They make the best charts in the world and, to this day, their word for chief is _Askew_.

Alternatively, years later, Jack will have been horrified to recognise Mr. Askew’s features on a shrunken head acquired from the fearsome _Jivaros_ of Peroo.  Askew’s other fates, adjusted for audience, circumstances and Jack’s current mood, range from sea-monsters and rivers of ice to a vicar’s daughter in the Cotswolds and a clutch of little Askews.  The truth, in all its discouraging narrative inadequacy, is that Jack never learns what befell the _Golden_ _Venture_ beyond the bald fact (extracted from the records by a most accommodating commodore of Jack’s acquaintance) that she was not heard of in England again.

~

But none of this is yet apparent to young Jack, growing taller and stronger on a South Sea Isle that posterity will not know as Redruth Island.  He quickly sets aside his forebodings and genuinely hopes to see Askew again.  Partly to this end, he busies himself charting every detail of the island and pesters its inhabitants to take him on deep sea fishing expeditions or tell him what they know of neighbouring lands.  This causes great amusement among the islanders, who never tire of pointing out that the full-grown foreigners, Penny and Poppy, are so scared of the sea they would rather do women’s work than go fishing, but little Tacky will pound yams for you all morning just for the chance to squat in the hull for three days and bail water.

In the end, Jack’s persistence and obvious talents pay off.  Once he’s able to hold a proper conversation (Ben has the language skills of a sexually precocious three-year-old; Bob’s wife is learning English), a navigator called Tevake agrees to teach him the lesser secrets.  Jack learns new names for the stars, recites the sequences in which they rise and set in particular directions, and which islands lie behind them.  This is the star compass, and it’s not hard: only the names and islands are new. 

The wind compass is more of a challenge.  Best of all is sailing by swell, recognising the rhythm and shape of the four main swell patterns that—if you listen right—will tell you direction, position, and where they last ran against land.  Finally, he learns about currents and how to tell if land is near by observing clouds, birds and the flash of deep-sea lightning Tevake calls _te lapa_. 

Tevake shows Jack charts—except they’re _not_ charts—woven from sticks and shells to show how these wave patterns crisscross the ocean, intersecting and reflecting off one another and off land.  These people don’t map specific islands or seas, but the way islands and seas in general behave: at last, Jack understands their indifference to his charts.  Tevake teaches him to feel the swell.  As a complete beginner, Jack has to do this by floating on his back in the ocean; later he learns how to stand naked on the canoe’s tilting deck and sense it through the soles of his feet and the swing of the flesh between his legs.  (It’s a wonderful method, but tricky to put into practice on the quarterdeck of a European ship.)  

It’s hardly Jack’s fault if—once back in the world of canvas and cable—he cultivates a certain mystery around his powers.  For one thing, Tevake swore him to secrecy, and anyway, on the rare occasions he tries to explain (even simple things like how the ship stays still while islands flow around it) people tend to shake their heads and call for someone less… _complicated_ to take the helm.

For now, among the islanders, it’s Jack’s compass and chart that raise eyebrows.  (The spyglass, however, is much admired.)  It’s a good life: as navigator, he’s always welcome on trading voyages; the girls are more than friendly; food is plentiful; they even brew a kind of beer.  It’s pleasantly hot, and there’s always the clear blue ocean nearby when you need to feel the wind in your sails, or just take a swim. 

But Jack knows there’s another, bigger, world beyond the horizon.  He glances surreptitiously at the compass, correlating its directions with Tevake’s system.  If he could only work out the island’s longitude, he could connect his new world with his old, and sail to anywhere at all; but no matter how far afield Tevake takes him (and Askew would be astounded at the extent of Jack’s maps), nothing they see matches anything on the _Venture’s_ charts. 

Jack starts to think it wouldn’t be so bad to stay here like Ben and Bob.  He could learn the greater secrets, become a famous navigator, his name remembered for generations, even though they don’t write.  He could marry a wife or two—no hurry about that—and chew betel in the shade while their children play on the beach…  But then comes The Dream.

~

She looks like his mother at first, the way she used to stand in front of the Wicked Wench, watching the chimney smoke blow away, but then she turns, and he sees her face.  Definitely not Mam.  She’s been chewing some kind of black betel (at least he hopes that’s all it is) but she’s got good teeth under the stains.  And she bobs her head when she smiles, almost like a serving wench, only full of mockery, daring anyone to give _her_ orders.  Jack rather likes it.

“So, Jack Sparrow,” she says.  Jack takes a mental step back: pretty, but creepy.  “Or Taki?  Which name you gonna keep, hmm?”

“Take your pick.”  He frames his most conciliatory smile.  “I’m not fussy.”

Wrong answer, clearly.  Jack picks himself up, trying not to wince.  “Fact is, I don’t see much chance to be fussy, seein’ as I’m stuck in this admittedly delightful locality.”

“Thought you was a sailor.”

“I am!  A bloody good one too!”  The words are out of his mouth before he can dress them pretty.  “Good enough to know there’s a hell of a lot of water out there an’ precious little chance of finding anything else when I don’t know where I am to begin with, savvy?”

She narrows her eyes.  “Don’ you savvy me, Tsaga’auweh.”

“Good thing you’re only a dream,” says Jack, bolder now he’s stood up for himself and not been knocked down for it, “or I’d be seriously worried about this conversation.”

The dream giggles and chucks him under the chin.  Perhaps bold was a mistake…

“Great storm a-comin’,” she says against all the available evidence (but then this _is_ a dream so maybe she knows what she’s talking about).  “If yo’ name still Jack Sparrow, you might wan’ to see what the sea leave behind.”

~

Three days after that, the shore-crabs start sealing their burrows.  Other storm signs follow, with the actual storm hitting on day five—and day six. 

On day seven, Jack rises at dawn to inspect the altered beach.  He finds the object almost at once, for it belongs here still less than the smashed coral, broken branches and dead sea-creatures: a lead canister, sealed with wax and stitched up tight in an oilskin wrapper.  Jack’s heart is pounding so hard he has to sit down to prise the thing open with a stone axe.  It contains—of course—a chart, yellow with age, stained and crumbling around the edges, but clearly showing a chain of islands that run northwest to southeast.  Two of them are recognisably the same islands Jack charted on one of his trading voyages with Tevake, who called them Makira and Ulata.  This chart calls the whole chain _Las Islas de Salomón_ (though if there’s gold to be found there, Jack’ll eat his pubic leaf) and marks their longitude around 173 degrees east of Seville.  It is signed Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa. 

Jack’s first thought is what fun it would be to show it to Askew.

~

**  
**


	7. A Ship

With the canoe’s woven leaf sail crackling in the wind and the outrigger scudding over the waves, Jack has no trouble finding good reasons for his sudden departure from Redruth Island.  He rehearses a simple version of the story when he calls to trade fishhooks for preserved breadfruit and green coconuts at the village of Kirakira (which he now knows is on an Isle of Solomon that Sarmiento de Gamboa, veering from Old to New Testament, named San Cristobal).  Bidding Kirakira farewell, Jack sails off towards the point of the star compass that will take him (with a stopover at Mili or Kusaie) from the _Islas de Salomón_ at 9° 24′ S, 173° 46′ E (from Seville) to his father’s Shipwreck Island at 19° 18′ N, 166° 38′ E (from London, itself obviously 6 degrees east of Seville). 

He’s somewhat disconcerted when his intended stopover turns out to be not Mili or Kusaie, but Pulawat, which he recognises from Tevake’s teachings.  There are two problems with Pulawat: it’s too hostile to land on, and it’s at least 15 degrees west of where Jack’s charts place both the Isles of Solomon and Shipwreck Island.  Jack knows he’s not drifted even one degree off his heading, so he decides to keep on northwards, with maybe a tad more easting, just to be on the safe side.  He could, of course, turn back, but what would be the point of magically acquired charts if they didn’t take you somewhere?  Anyway, he’s having far too much fun.  It isn’t until the coconuts are empty and the point where he expected to find his father’s islands is surely far behind him—or possibly beside him, but certainly not _near_ —that he starts to wonder if the whole thing was a mistake.

By this time, Jack’s more or less persuaded himself (and totally convinced his imaginary listeners) that he stole a canoe and fled Redruth to escape the vengeance of several native families whose daughters had given birth to suspiciously pale-skinned children.  (He tries not to remember that the islanders were firstly not much darker than himself, and secondly remarkably relaxed about their daughters’ activities; also, said daughters knew tricks that have served him well for avoiding complications ever since.)  The story doesn’t explain why he gave his precious spyglass to Tevake, but it beats admitting that he set out on the open ocean trusting a couple of charts of unknown reliability and his own—admittedly exceptional—talents.  Or that unspecified powers appear to be interfering in his life.

Not that a small amount of mysterious interference would go entirely amiss at this point.

“At least one of those bastards got his longitude all wrong.”  Even to himself, he sounds petulant—and alarmingly croaky from lack of water.

“Of course they did!” retorts his rational self, not croaking at all because, well, just _because_.  “This far out to sea, _everybody_ gets their longitude wrong!”

This is perfectly true.  How could he have forgotten?  Must come from spending so long among people who don’t know what longitude means…  And rum.  He really misses rum…

“Could use a drink right now,” he says, possibly out loud. 

At this point, either he passes out or the sky turns black with unnatural suddenness.  Next thing he knows, the canoe is caught in a rainstorm of such intensity that it fills the hull with several inches of fresh water.

“Ta very much,” croaks Jack, leaning forward to scoop water into a coconut shell.  “Don’t mind if I do.”

He’s busy filling and stoppering his supply of empty shells when the rain gives way to fish.  And crabs, which is odd out in the deep ocean but Jack is fast recalibrating his scale of oddity.  He sorts crabs and fish into different compartments of the canoe, where they won’t nip his toes.

“D’you know your bloody chart’s no good?” he asks (only slightly croaky now) for he has a pretty good idea who’s behind the recent increase in meteorological phenomena and piscine suicides.  “I sailed just west of north from it and ended up in Pulawat instead of Mili.  Then east of north: now look where I am!”  He tries to sweep an arm round the horizon, but finds this makes him dizzy.

“The sea cannot be measured by numbers on a page!”

It bloody well can if you get your sums right, thinks Jack, but keeps his mouth shut for once because it might be unwise to contradict supernatural females perched on the outrigger struts.

Said female pulls an object from the water and hands it to Jack with a smile.  It looks like a box of hardtack: one that’s spent a very long time on the seabed.  With difficulty, he prises it open to reveal a soggy mush of drowned weevil porridge.  He pokes the tip of one little finger into the mess, braces himself, and licks it, tasting salt and the decay of ages.

“Not bad!”  He forces a smile.  “Should make a nice stuffing for the flying fish.”

She smiles wider and passes him a barnacled, weed-encrusted bottle.  Now _this_ is more like it.  Jack’s smile forms all by itself.

“I can’t help forming the impression,” he ventures after a while, emboldened by a few swigs of the mellowest rum he’s ever tasted, “that you want me to visit my father, or this island of his.  Now why would that be, I wonder?”

 “You very like yo’ father.”  She laughs at that.  “Him lost at sea too, ’fore you got born.  Played me at dice for him life.  We made an accord, him an’ I.  You be a part of it.”

Jack doesn’t like the sound of that at all, but she’s still talking.

“That trinket him leave you make you a _Pirate Lord_ , Jack Sparrow!”  She sniggers at the title; maybe she just thinks it sounds silly.  Then she looks Jack in the eye, deadly serious.  “Would you promise it to my service, to do jus’ one favour when I ask it?  Promise, an’ I can tell you how to sail to Shipwreck Cove.”  She smiles again, but there’s a hunger in her eyes that makes Jack’s skin crawl.

“This _one favour_ …  Is it liable to cost me anything I’ll regret?”  Remembering Granny’s tales, he adds, “which includes life, or anything else that I _would_ regret if I were still in a position to know how I felt about it.”

 “Jack, Jack,” she croons, ruffling his soggy hair.  “How could I harm _you_?  Providin’ you don’ cheat me, you got no cause to fear.  No cause but the sea…”

This last is a good point.  Fish, rainwater, and even rum will only sustain a man so long, and he has a feeling the weather will set against him if he turns back now.  And “pirate lord” can’t be all bad.  So there’s really not much choice.

“Done,” he says, somewhat bleakly.

“Done!”  She grins, and gestures east by north.  At the tip of her pointing finger, lightning cracks the horizon.

“Right!  That way!” says Jack grimly and turns to trim the sail. 

As far as he can tell, she doesn’t stay to watch or give any more directions.  She doesn’t need to.  He follows her heading perfectly, day and night, tacking when the wind is against him, correcting after sleep or storms drive him off course, but always making headway in the right direction.  He can never understand why other people seem to find this difficult.

~

Shipwreck is a tiny speck.  Without Tevake’s landfinding methods, Jack could have sailed right past it, but he follows the swell patterns and feeding birds until the water changes from blue to green and there’s coral and sandbanks below him.  No wonder they named it Shipwreck!  There’s a big reef that rings it around as far as Jack can be bothered to look, and a whole maze of shoals, jagged with coral rock, that no European ship could possibly sail through without a chart.

Jack can’t be bothered threading his way through the channels on his map, and anyway, he’d rather land somewhere unexpected and inconspicuous.  Come high tide, he gives the canoe a good bail, throws out the last of his supplies to lighten it further, and paddles cautiously into the labyrinth.  The little craft is shallow enough to cope with anything that doesn’t disturb the surface water; he half floats, half drags it over the main reef and into the still water of the lagoon behind. 

It’s then he realises there’s no shore, nor indeed visible land of any sort: instead, there’s what looks like a pine tree with windows.  There must be coral, or basalt, or _something_ holding the thing in place, but it’s buried too deep under accretions of driftwood and, well, of shipwrecks to show anything but spars and masts bristling from a tottering pyramid of pointy wooden bits.  So much for finding a deserted beach where he can hide the canoe.

He barely has time to tie up to a jetty before he’s surrounded by a pungent crowd of men with rusty, notched, but generally dangerous-looking—and specifically unsheathed—edged weapons.  Jack still has his sailor’s knife hidden in the folds of a barkcloth sash, but that’s it.  He wishes his britches hadn’t disintegrated beyond repair: the pubic leaf suddenly seems rather inadequate.  He smiles and holds up his right hand, palm out, allowing the left to rest on the sash just over the knife.

“Oi!” calls a voice, “where the fuck did you wash up from?”

“Tha’s right!  Go on an’ ask ’im another, ’cos ’e looks like a cove wot speaks the King’s English…

_“_ _C’est un des cannibales des îles…_ _”_

_“Nàwng hong nyéung a hkéng yang wê?”_

_“_ _Mais non!_ _”_

_“Yu savvy tok pidgin?  Husat nem bilong yu?  Yu stilim kanu?”_

_“¿_ _Que?_ _”_

Jack bows to the two Englishmen and, in his best Askew, says, “Permit me to introduce myself, gentlemen.  Jack Sparrow, lately Navigator on the _Golden Venture_ , narrowly escaped from cannibals on several occasions, and bearing a private message for the Keeper of Shipwreck Island.  And you would be...?”

“Dunno wot ’e’s on about,” says Oi.

“Me neither,” agrees his mate.  “Ain’t no Keeper of Shipwreck Island.”

“ _Viens avec moi, mon petit.  On avait justement besoin d’un nouveau mousse._ ”  One of the Frenchman puts an arm around Jack’s shoulders and tries to lead him away, but Jack shakes him off.  He didn’t come all this way to be anybody’s latest cabin boy. 

“Well there’d bloody well better be a Keeper of Something hereabouts,” he blusters (for doesn’t it say _Ask for the Keeper_ on Da’s map?)  He points to the tatty leather pouch that still hangs round his neck.  “I’ve got it in writing.”

“Writing?”  Oi looks startled.

_“_ _¡Escritura!_ _”_ translates a short, fat pirate.  A gasp goes up from the French and Spanish.

“The… Code!” whispers Tha’sright in the ensuing awestruck hush.

“Aye!” says Jack.  “The Code!”

A brief fight ensues over who’s going to take Jack to the Keeper, but then everyone puts their weapons away and acts frightfully civilised.  Jack is escorted up the wooden alleyways, wondering what on earth this Code business is all about, and whether the fearsomeness of pirates has been seriously overrated.  Perhaps Shipwreck is some kind of pirate asylum where they confine the incurably stupid.  But then what was Jack’s father doing here?

~

“Well, not a message _exactly_ ,” admits Jack, trying not to shift from one foot to the other under the Keeper’s dark gaze.  “Not as such.  More of a… _token_.”  He’s reluctant to take the thing from his pouch after keeping it secret for so long, but steels himself to get it over with.  If this Keeper decides to, well, keep it and give Jack nothing in exchange, well then Jack doesn’t want whatever it is the Keeper’s keeping. 

It’s years since he opened the pouch: the leather might as well be welded shut.  Jack slices it open with his knife and hands over the talisman and the crumpled, washed-out map.

The Keeper holds them up to the light.  “Well bugger me clockwise!” he says at last.  “Julie’s brat!”  He looks sharply at Jack, who stares right back, resenting the term “brat” but not saying anything yet.  “When were you born, lad?”

“Dunno,” says Jack, who doesn’t.

The Keeper pulls him across the room to peer at their reflections in a mirror.  “Aye,” he says at last.  “Like enough.  How’d you get here?”

“Sailed,” says Jack, “round the Horn and past the Isles of Solomon.”  It sounds damned impressive, he decides.  “Longitude was a bit tricky, what with the doldrums an’ waterspouts an’ all, but a few adjustments, a spot of nautical intuition an’, well… here I am!”

“Penniless and stark naked in a canoe,” finishes the Keeper, most unfairly disparaging in Jack’s opinion.

“I’ve got a sash,” Jack protests.  “And my _mua’uaka_ —pubic leaf, Mr. Askew called it.”

The Keeper turns away suddenly, coughing and spluttering.  “Aye,” he says, when he’s himself again.  “Thank Christ for moo-whackers!  But what am I to do with you, Jackie?  Do you even know what it is you’ve brought me?”

“Not entirely.”  If there’s a right moment for proclaiming yourself a Pirate Lord, Jack’s sure this isn’t it.  His belief in himself is temporarily somewhat smaller than his _mua’uaka_.

“This worthless-looking bauble…”  The Keeper flicks it with his fingernail, making it dance in the sunlight that slants through the stern window above him.  “… is what’s called a Piece of Eight.  One of the nine Pieces of Eight that makes its owner one of the nine Pirate Lords.  (Don’t get carried away now, Jackie: they’re as big fools as regular pirates—bigger, most of ’em.)  Now, do you have any idea of the trouble it’d stir up if I were to summon the Brethren Court—the other eight, that is—and tell them that the long-lost ninth Lord is a scrawny, ship’s brat from an honest merchant vessel—an honest merchant vessel that most probably sank, if it’s not still sailing round in circles?”

Jack studies his bare toes, feeling somewhat sick.

“You have to be a _captain_ to be a Pirate Lord, Jackie.  And all you’re captain of is a small, leaky canoe.”

“Not s’posed to be watertight,” mumbles Jack, who’s become very fond of his canoe.  “More flexible that way.  Less chance of breaking up in a storm, and it’ll float even when it’s swamped.”

“I’ll take your word for its hidden qualities, but I’ll not present you to the Court until you get yourself a ship and cease to be a laughing stock.  ’Twould bring dishonour on the Code.”  Dismissively, he tosses Jack a small purse.  “Get some britches too, while you’re at it.”

Jack screws up his courage for one more try, hating the Keeper with every bone in his body.  “I’m a bloody good navigator,” he says.  “I’d like to see any of your eight Lords make the journey I made!”  He wishes his voice wouldn’t squeak like that.

“There’s not one of ’em could do it,” agrees the Keeper, to Jack’s amazement.  “But I can’t put you before ’em yet, lad, for—fools though they are—they’d soon figure out what you’ve not seen.  Did yer mam tell you nothing about yer father?”

Jack shakes his head, confused by the chance of tack.  “Just that he was a sailor.”  It takes a minute to dig down through the layers of fabrication.  “An Irish pirate.”

“Aye, an Irish pirate named Bob Teague.  That’s my name, boy: _Captain_ Robert Teague.”

Jack never especially wanted a father.  He certainly doesn’t want this one with his “brat” and his “leaky” and his “dishonour on the Code”.

“Never saw you,” he mutters.

“I went back to the Wench one time,” says Teague, doing a good job of looking wistful, “but they told me you’d all gone.  No-one knew where to.”

“Bollocks,” says Jack succinctly.  “Mam went back to her people, but my sister an’ me, we stayed.  We’d’ve seen you.”

“There _was_ a daughter, but I was looking for Julie.  Or her boy.  Didn’t wait to speak to the girl.”

“Oh.”

“Where’d your mother go?  I’d like to see her again.  She was quite a lass.”

“She’s dead,” begins Jack, but smoothly adjusts his heading, “dead important among her own people.  But I reckon she _might_ see you, if you ask nicely.”

“Her own people?”

“The _Jivaros_.”  Jack can’t suppress a smile, but does his best to modulate it from wicked to fond.  “Of Peroo.  I can draw you a map.”

~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jack leaves Shipwreck as soon as he can – navigator on the French ship that needed a cabin-boy. I expect this is how he ends up learning about corsets in Singapore. And, yes, at some point, he will be forced to take refuge among a group of monkeys in South India, and he will meet a nice young man called Beckett. Who will give him a job, and his own ship. He might even meet Larry.


End file.
